New SQL Editor

Anyone remember Informix’s SQLEditor? I bet some of you still use it regulary. It’s simple and easy to work with, whether you are a database developer, a DBA or for whatever purpose you use SQL/SPL. I always liked that you can work with lot of SQL in the editor and execute just the selected commands, that you can execute more commands at the same time and get results in separate tabs, and that you can go through tabs with shortcut keys, so most of the time you can use keyboard only. It has some shortcomings, such as extremely annoying single level undo. And it’s a Windows application. However, it is light, doesn’t take gigs of memory, unlike some other database tools. And it is not available any more from IBM for quite some time now.

When I was migrating my desktop environment from Windows to Ubuntu several years ago, I needed a new SQL tool to manage my development and DBA tasks. As there were no light, reasonably fast, free solutions available (perhaps I’ll elaborate on this in some future post), I made one myself. I was learning Groovy in that time, so this was a great opportunity to explore the power of this language and make something that I’ll use. The goal was to make useful tool, very similar in appearance and functionality to Informix SQL Editor, with as simple code as possible. I’m using it on a daily basis for years now. And finally, I made an effort this month and open-sourced it.

So, without further ado, I’m proud to present the IFMX SQL Editor! It is released under GNU GPL license, and everything is available at GitHub as ifmx-sql-editor project – the code, downloads, wiki, issue tracker, etc.

As it is compiled to Java byte code, it can be executed on various operating systems. There is ready-to-use binary archive available for download (direct link), along with some getting started instructions.